Military service: US Army, 116th Reg't Illinois Infantry, to First Sgt. (1862-65)

Charles Bowles, aka Charles Boles, aka Charles Bolton, aka T.Z. Spaulding, became famous as the notorious stagecoach robber and poet Black Bart. He was born in England, and came to America with his family when he was about two years old, settling in Alexandria township in upstate New York. As a young man he came west with the California gold rush in about 1852, and by the time he was married two years later he had changed the spelling of his name from Bowles to Boles. In 1862 he enlisted with the Union Army during the American Civil War, and he served with honor under Ulysses S. Grant in Mississippi, and in William T. Sherman's Yazoo Expedition of 1862-63. He was shot and seriously wounded in Sherman's famous "March to the Sea" in 1864, but recovered and returned to active duty.

After the war Boles farmed for several years in Iowa, then abruptly left his home and family in the spring of 1867. He wrote home occasionally, but after a few years the letters stopped, and his wife assumed that he had been killed. His infamous string of California stagecoach robberies began in 1875, and over the next eight years no-one knew his name, but he came to be called "Black Bart", from a villainous character in a dime novel. On his 3 August 1877 heist of a stagecoach en route to Duncan's Mills, California, he left his first poem, discovered under a rock on a tree stump near the scene of the crime:

I've labored long and hard for breadfor honor and for richesbut on my corns too long you've tredyou fine-haired sons of
bitches.

With this poem, Black Bart went from common highway robber to media star and folk anti-hero, and his fame rose further with a second poem found after a subsequent robbery. According to news accounts, in one of his last letters to his wife he wrote that he had been wronged by a Wells Fargo employee and vowed to take his vengeance, and indeed, he always targeted Well Fargo stages. He robbed only from the company's strongboxes and the mail in transit, never from the passengers. Witnesses said that the thief was unfailingly polite to drivers and passengers, occasionally endulging in conversations described as "intellectual".

In a stagecoach robbery at California's Funk Hill on 3 November 1883, he accidentally dropped a handkerchief, which had a four-digit laundry mark on the cloth. Detectives spent a week visiting dozens of laundries in San Francisco, and found the specific shop where it had last been washed. Additional footwork led them to another customer of the laundry, who claimed to recognize the hanky and said it belonged to one Charles Bolton of 37 Second Street, room number 40.

At that address Black Bart was arrested without a struggle on 12 November 1883, and four days later he pled guilty to a single count of robbery, the crime at Funk Hill. He was sentenced to six years at San Quentin, where he was released in 1888, almost two years early due to his good behavior behind bars. He then spent about a month at the Nevada House Hotel in San Francisco, before buying a ticket to Visalia on 28 February 1888. He boarded the train the following morning, and after he stepped off the train in Visalia he was never seen again.